TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

Questioning Statins - part 2 (September 9, 2014)

Statin drugs reduce the levels of cholesterol in the blood, sometimes very effectively, and they are useful for people with existing heart disease. But if you use a statin to lower the level of your blood cholesterol, is that as beneficial as doing so by changing your diet and exercise habits? This question is rarely asked (and to my knowledge hasn't been studied at all), but it should be, and not just of statins but of any medication that is used to "change a number". Because drugs and diet do not change the body in the same way. Assuming that they do gives us license to overuse medications. Cholesterol is a molecule that is essential in animal life. All animals manufacture their own, and in many other locations besides the target of anti-cholesterol medications, the liver. We don't need to torture ourselves by learning the 30-plus step process that our bodies perform to make cholesterol, because it’s enough to know that the whole process starts with dietary saturated fat. When you eat too much saturated and trans fat, your body makes too much cholesterol from it, and that winds up in your blood and accelerates atherosclerosis and heart disease. If you eat less ‘bad” fat, your body consequently makes less cholesterol. You can see that this is a much simpler and far more elegant intervention than ham-handedly interfering with normal liver function.

Plus, and this is important too, it’s not that that particular function in the liver is the problem. Statins target the liver because it’s a convenient and effective way to lower the amount of cholesterol in the blood, not because there’s something wrong with the liver. Someone who lowers their cholesterol by taking a statin but still consumes too much bad fat may be somewhat lowering his or her future risk of a heart attack, but s/he won't influence any other problems that that excess consumption might cause (including breast and colon cancer, as well as obesity with all of its associated problems).

And statins don’t just address a single chemical reaction in the liver. When you consume a physiologically active compound and absorb it into your bloodstream, it goes everywhere, not just where you want it to go. And it interferes with that particular chemical process EVERYWHERE IT GOES – often producing what are commonly called “side effects”. (A little more on this subject below)

So when you look at it closely, handling too-high blood cholesterol by giving your body less of the raw material it uses to manufacture it versus clumsily interfering with scores of important processes willy nilly all over the body, there’s no doubt which one is preferable.

Most of all, treating cholesterol is not the same thing as treating heart disease, and this is also a problem intrinsic to the nature of many medications. They may be helping out with some disorder-related issues, but that is not the same thing as fixing the problem. Taking a drug is not the same as preventing that problem from manifesting by means of a lifestyle change, ever, ever, ever.